Aishwarya Rai is Sita. Vikram is Ram. Abhishek Bachchan is Raavan. Or Aishwarya Rai is Arundhati Roy. Vikram is P Chidambaram, therefore the unbending Indian state. And Abhishek Bachchan is any Naxalite commander.

Yes, you can read Raavan any way you want. As a modern interpretation of Ramayana. Or as a parable for what is known as the Naxalite problem. But that, and the stunning locales of Chalakudi and Athirapally in Kerala, Ooty, Orcha and Malshej Ghat near Pune are among the very few pleasures of a film that expects you to be drawn to a Beera/Raavan played as a boy buffoon, not as a mercurial anti-hero who both attracts and repels the goddess-like Ragini/Sita (Aishwarya). Every time, Beera, part Robin Hood and part Raavan, appears on screen, the film falls flat. Which is somewhat alarming given that the film is dedicated to his revenge on Dev/Ram (VIkram) whose men disrupt his sister's wedding and leave her an emotional and physical wreck. That scene, of Jamuniya/Shrupanakha (Priyamani) retelling her horror is riveting and wrenching. As are scenes such as Aishwarya plunging down a cliff rather than letting Abhishek get her, and a final face off between Abhishek and Vikram on a burning bridge across the ghats.

But a film should be more than the sum of a few brilliant frames, shot by Santosh Sivan (V.K. Manikandan is also credited as director of photography but retired somewhat early clearly not equal to the task at hand). Why is Beera so angry with the state? Yes, they were unforgiveable to his sister but is political just personal for him? Why is Ragini so attracted to Beera? Or is the political personal for her, a free spirit who is given to questioning everything?

There are two elements to the film that needed it to work. The sexual tension between Beera and Ragini, as they discover feelings for each other (as they would, I imagine, given the copious amounts of water and mist thrown at them, two staples of Hindi romance). And the tension of the chase, as Dev and Hemant/Laxman (a buffed up and excellent Nikhil Dwivedi) close in on Beera with the help of Sanjeevani/Hanuman, brilliantly played by Govinda. Neither has enough momentum. Perhaps Mani Ratnam got distracted by the logistics of the shoot. Or perhaps by the awesome landscape. He just doesn't keep a tight control on his narrative. It is not enough to have African chants and Arabic strains sounding loudly every time Beera appears on the scene. It is also not enough to have him mouth revolutionary dialogue, to dress him in black, and make him wear eyeliner. He has to seem capable of both menace and romance, be both a "dus chehre wala" and a "dus sir wala". You'd be lucky coming out of the movie thinking he had even one.

It doesnt take much for even the ordinary viewer to see the politics of Raavan. The tribals of Lal Maati need to be won over by "soch samajh" (good thinking) not by "zor zabardasti" (force), says a troubled Hanuman to Ram. "Itna mare ho ki danda maro ya goli koi asar nahin hota hai (You have attacked us so much it makes no difference whether you use guns or sticks)," says Mangal, Raavan's brother (an outstanding Ravi Kissan). There is no such thing as good or evil--despite Aishwarya's pure white and Abhishek's black shirt/pants at the end of the film underlining the confrontation just in case anyone had missed it. If Raavan can bomb a police outpost in anger, Ram can kill a retreating peacemaker in cold blood. "Bhagwan kaun" and "rakshasa kaun" is the question. If Raavan thinks Sita is as 'khara' as 'sona', then Ram thinks she should do a polygraph test (the modern equivalent of trial by fire you see) to establish her innocence over 14 days (clue! clue!) of having lived in the forest.

Yes, so we get Mani Ratnam's politics. What we don't get is his art. This is perhaps his most beautiful film--and that's saying a lot for someone who makes such an effort to frame his scenes. But it is also one of his weakest central characterisations. So weak that it is unable to elevate the staging of a classic cat and mouse chase in the context of a Ramayan from a smart marketing gimmick to an extraordinarily risky idea.

Aishwarya's Sita is one of the best things in the film, strong, screaming yes, but also exquisite in her designer suffering. Yes, no tribal has ever been dressed so lovingly as Aishwarya's borrowed finery by Sabyasachi but her performance is heartfelt--this is a performer who is at ease playing women, rather than girls. Vikram's calculated rage, his questioning of her innocence, his ultimately superficial appreciation of her trophy wife-like qualities are well done. And as we said before the peripheral characters make the film tolerable. But when the centre cannot hold, you dont need William Butler Yeats to tell you that things fall part. They do so spectacularly enough with a lot of explosives, petrol, severed limbs and flying bombs. It's worthy of a film that is too self consciously an epic. And while I have to say I enjoyed a spot of amateur detective work (ah, there's the tree in Ashok Vatika where Hanuman drops Ram's ring in her lap, and ah, there's the bridge that symbolises the burning of Lanka) it was not enough to offset a film that was as flat as the landscape was jagged.

I dont know about you, but I'm going to watch it in Tamil tomorrow. I have high hopes from Vikram as Raavana. And Aishwarya in any language is becomingly increasingly unmissable.

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